


in the dark and lonely night

by perilousgard



Series: run to you [1]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, but is it bad really, i'm sad that's not already a tag, joyce is in mourning and makes bad decisions, post-s2, sad boning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-20
Updated: 2019-08-20
Packaged: 2020-09-18 19:30:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20318308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perilousgard/pseuds/perilousgard
Summary: Joyce is hurting after what happened at Hawkins Lab, and when she calls Hopper in the middle of the night, he can't bring himself to say no to her.





	in the dark and lonely night

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote more fic, WHAAAAT? This one kinda sorta takes its title from the song "Dark and Lonely Night," by Tiger Army. Also, this could potentially have a sequel?

Hopper got the call in the middle of the night.

He instinctively thought he was being called to a crime scene, so his first bleary words when he picked up the receiver were, "Chief speaking." 

"Hop?"

"Joyce?" His senses shook themselves into fuller wakefulness. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," she said, and her voice was so low, so quiet - he figured she was trying not wake her kids. "Well - not so fine, actually. Can you come over?"

Hopper was definitely awake now. "Come over? At three in the morning?"

"Uh huh."

He paused for a long moment, trying to gather the right words together. "I...are you...is this..."

"God, Hopper, yes, it's what it sounds like." There's an edge to her voice, tempered with something Hopper couldn't put a name to.

"Uh..." He was still at a loss for words. Joyce Byers was giving him a booty call. It was... a bad idea, on so many levels, and Hopper's automatic response should have been no. But Hopper generally had a hard time saying no when it came to Joyce. 

"This doesn't have to mean anything okay? I just...I can't sleep, I can't think about anything except what happened in that lab, and I keep seeing...I keep seeing him die, again and again. I just want it to stop for a little while."

His mind was frozen on her first words. This doesn't have to mean anything. Hopper felt something ugly twist in his gut. Feelings that he had ignored for years were surging to the surface, demanding to be felt. Oh, this was a bad idea.

"Hop? Are you there?" Her voice was small and desperate.

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm here." He swallowed hard, shifting the phone to his other ear. "Listen, uh...give me fifteen minutes. I'll be there."

"Thank you."

He hung up the phone, heading back to his bedroom in a daze. He passed by El's room - El! Shit, he'd forgotten about - but no, she wasn't there, she was at Max's for the night. Good timing. Had Joyce known El wasn't with him? He shook his head, reaching blindly for the nearest pair of pants. He wouldn't think too hard about this. Well – he would try not to think too hard about this. If Joyce needed, wanted him for this, then…he would be there. He would give her whatever she needed. 

Hopper pulled on a shirt, looked down at it, tugged it off and reached for a different one. Did Joyce like this shirt? He thought he remembered her complimenting it once. Then he groaned inwardly – what did it matter? This wasn’t a date. The shirt would end up on the floor somewhere.

Biting his lip, he gave himself a brief once-over in the mirror and then grabbed his keys, heading out to the truck.

The drive to Joyce’s house never took long, and so Hopper didn’t get much time to meditate over the choice he was making. That was good – again, he didn’t want to think about it. Hell, maybe this was Joyce’s way of admitting there was something between them. They had never been very good at confronting their feelings for each other. Hopper remembered all the times he had wanted to kiss her, when they were still in high school. All the times he could have, before Lonnie showed up to darken her doorway. They could have had something. 

He couldn’t redo the past, of course. But he could make up for lost time. 

She felt something for him. He knew she did.

So he parked his car in her driveway, strode up to the front porch, knocked on her door, and promptly lost all the confidence he’d taken from that last thought.

When she opened the door, he didn’t even know what to say. He gaped at her like an idiot. Fortunately, she didn’t give him much time to do so. Almost as soon as the door was opened, she was pulling him inside, whispering for him to stay quiet. It was dark and cool inside the house, but her hand, wrapped around his wrist, was hot. 

Her floorboards creaked as they moved down the hall. Hopper knew he was probably making most of the noise, being so much taller and heavier than Joyce, but it seemed they were quiet enough. When she got him into her room and closed the door, she paused for a moment to listen out for her boys. Hearing only silence, she sighed and leaned against the wall. Hopper watched her, shifting his weight from foot to foot.

“Ah…permission to speak?” he tried.

“I don’t think talking is really required for this, Hop.” She moved away from the door, closing the distance between them. When he felt her hands alight on his chest, he caught them in hers, stopping her before she could do whatever it is she’d planned on doing to initiate this. Her mouth curved downward in a slight frown. “Hopper –“

“Look, I just – I’m gonna go along with this, okay,” he started, thinking about how small she was, about how much his hands dwarfed her own. “I just need to be sure this is what you really want.”

“If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t have called you,” Joyce said simply, and then she rose up on her toes to catch his mouth with hers.

Her lips were soft and warm, and somehow it was even better than how he’d imagined it, off and on for the past twenty-five years. He let go of her hands, and they slid up around his neck, and his moved to her waist, tugging her firmly against him. He didn’t realize he had half lifted her off her feet until they unbalanced, and he had to step back to keep them from toppling over. She sighed against his mouth, her hands moving to his shirt hem, and his moved to the string of her pajama pants without much thought. 

His mouth kept contact with her skin as much as possible as they struggled out of their clothes. He kissed her lips, her neck, her collarbone and shoulder. Somehow he’d gotten her shirt off, and she wasn’t wearing a bra, and Hopper swore under his breath. His hands hovered, hesitant to take this final step, to touch her in this way, but she pulled his hands to her, and he groaned softly as her nipples hardened almost instantly. She was so soft, and he was already straining against his jeans. 

Joyce shimmied out of her underwear, reaching for his belt, but he lifted her and all but tossed her onto the bed before she could undo the buckle. Meaningless hookup or not, this was something he was not going to skip out on. She sat up a little when she saw him sinking to his knees in front of her, and he could hear the protest forming on her lips before she said a word. 

“This is for you,” he said, his voice coming out deeper than usual. “Let me do this.”

She sighed a little, and nodded, and he leaned in, gently spreading her legs. 

He hadn’t done this for awhile, but it was like riding a bicycle, he thought – once you learned how, you never forgot. At the first brush of his tongue against her clit, Joyce’s hips arched up and she gasped, swallowing a moan. Yes, he still knew how to do this. Trying not to smile against her, Hopper closed his mouth around the little bud and suckled gently, rolling his tongue over her. Her gasps became little cries, which she seemed to be muffling against her hand – not that Hopper could see from this vantage point. He became lost in the sound and smell of her, hand creeping down to her entrance, pushing a curious finger inside. She was slick down here already, easily taking him, and when he added a second finger, she gasped his name.

He'd never thought that nickname could sound so sexy.

He teased her with his mouth and fingers until she pulled on his hair, tensing up as she climaxed. He felt her tighten around his fingers and muffled a curse into her thigh, stilling his ministrations as she came down from the high. Hopper rested his head on her hip, looking up at her with what he hoped wasn’t terribly obvious tenderness. She met his eyes after catching her breath, then reached down so she could pull him up into a kiss. 

Kissing her was possibly his new favorite activity, so he indulged her enthusiastically, his hips coming to rest against hers. She grunted in displeasure when her bare skin pressed against the fabric of his jeans, and he chuckled, still kissing her as he reached to fumble them down. She broke the kiss to help him, and together they got his jeans and underwear down and off his body, leaving them both naked.

She immediately pulled him close again, and this time he couldn’t hold back a groan when he pressed back between her thighs, his aching cock brushing against the soft hair at her center. He pulled back enough to meet her eyes, hoping the little rocking motions her hips were making wouldn’t send him over the edge. “Ah, condom?”

“Oh, right.” Joyce stretched her arm out, yanking the drawer of her bedside table open. After rummaging around for a moment, she pulled out a little package and held it up for him. “These are still good.”

“Good to know.” He grinned at her, and opened the package with his teeth. She helped him roll the condom on, her hands hot around the width of him, and once again he prayed he would last long enough to make this enjoyable for her. “Ah…you ready?”

“Yeah.” She sighed as he began to press into her, closing her eyes. “Fuck –”

“Too much?”

“You’re just – big,” she said, and smacked his arm when he started to grin again. “That’s not meant to boost your ego.”

“’S not,” he said, even though it definitely had. “I’ll go slow…”

Eventually, they got there. Her body slowly stretched for him, and she kept her hands clamped firmly around his upper arms, and he bit his lip hard to keep from thrusting into her. When he was finally inside her fully, she sighed and shifted her hands from his arms to his waist, shifting her body beneath him. 

“Okay?” he grunted.

“Uh huh.” She leaned up to kiss him again, just briefly, and deliberately arched her hips against his. “C’mon, Hop.”

He didn’t need to be told twice. Shifting his weight so that he could tangle one hand in her dark hair, he began to move against her, their bodies naturally finding a rhythm with one another. Hopper focused on the sound of her breath, the little gasps and soft moans she made, the feeling of her hands on his hips and wandering around to grip his ass. He drove into her harder, a bit rougher, hitching one of her legs up around his hip. Joyce threw her head back, and he couldn’t resist leaning down to press his lips to the hollow of her neck. 

He came first, when he couldn’t hold back anymore, grunting her name into her hair. He thrust a few more times into her, trying not to collapse because it felt so good, and moved a hand down to rub his thumb against her clit until she came too, with a soft little cry. Then he folded himself over her, careful not to crush her, and the two of them breathed into the darkness. 

Several minutes later, she sat up a bit, pulling the bedsheet around her, and reached for her pack of cigarettes. He sat up too when she offered him a smoke, and they sat in silence together for awhile, white tendrils curling up into the air between them. Hopper was comfortable and sleepy, but didn’t want to wake up in case this was all some crazy fever dream.

“You can stay,” Joyce murmured eventually, “but you need to be gone before the kids are up. By six o’clock.”

“Joyce…” He wanted to ask her so many things. Did this really mean nothing? Can you actually tell me you don’t have feelings for me? Is this going to happen again? But the words wouldn’t come. As she looked at him expectantly, he shook his head and pulled her close, kissing the crown of her head as he had those few weeks ago outside the Snowball Dance. She relaxed against him, apparently grateful for his silence, and he let her have this night the way she wanted it – as a distraction.

Tomorrow, though, was a different story.


End file.
